Emmeline Pankhurst: Deeds Not Words

Emmeline Goulden Pankhurst (born 15 July 1858)

I've already noted two key British suffrage activists, the sisters Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Millicent Garrett Fawcett, but today's posting, for Emmeline Pankhurst, focuses on perhaps the most prominent figure in the cause of women's suffrage in Britain.

For what it's worth, Pankhurst was also included as one of the twentieth century's one hundred "most influential people" in Time magazine's end-of-the-century round-up, along with Einstein, the Roosevelts (Eleanor as well as Theodore and Franklin), Stalin, and Gandhi--but, then, the list included Lucille Ball and Bart Simpson, so, as I say, "for what it's worth." Though Aretha was on the list too, so there is that.)

Emmeline Pankhurst, c. 1913

Anyway, born on 15 July 1858, Emmeline Goulden was the daughter of a Manchester businessman, Robert Goulden, and Sophia Crane, both politically active--Robert Goulden campaigning against slavery, among other social causes, Sophia Crane Goulden a feminist who actively supported women's suffrage. As a friend of John Stewart Mill, Robert Goulden also supported the suffrage movement.

Despite their progressive politics, however, neither of Emmeline's parents was interested in educating their daughters in the same way they educated their sons.

As early as 1868, Emmeline and her younger sister Mary attended a suffrage demonstration; by 1872 she had attended her first suffrage meeting. A year later, in 1873, she was sent to the École Normale de Neuilly, but there she learned more than the kinds of conventional training in domestic skills that her parents seemed to consider all that was essential for girls. (Later, in her autobiography, she would write, "It used to puzzle me to understand why I was under such a particular obligation to make home attractive to my brothers. We were on excellent terms of friendship, but it was never suggested to them as a duty that they make home attractive to me.")

The school provided its female students, like Emmeline Goulden, a program that included chemistry and bookkeeping in addition to the kinds of finishing-school education most girls usually received. Soon after her return to Manchester in 1878, Emmeline Goulden met Richard Pankhurst; the two were married in 1879.

The marriage was reasonably happy--Richard Pankhurst had previously sworn to remain a bachelor so he could devote himself to public service, including drafting the Municipal Franchise Act of 1869 allowing unmarried female householders a vote in local elections. Emmeline gave birth to six children in ten years.  Three daughters, Christabel, Sylvia, and Adela, would join their mother in the suffrage cause. A son, Francis, died at the age of four in 1888; Pankhurst gave birth to another boy in 1889.

In 1889, after some disappointment with the direction other women's suffrage groups had been taking, Emmeline and Richard Pankhurst founded the Women's Franchise League, a "radical" group that not only advocated for the vote for both married and unmarried women but also supported unions and advocated reforms in marriage and property laws (in particular in relationship to divorce and inheritance). The group's political aims and ambitions caused it to fall apart.

Emmeline Pankhurst at the podium, 1905, in front of
the WSPU slogan, "Deeds Not Words."

By the time Richard Pankhurst died in 1898, Christabel had joined her mother in the suffrage cause (as would Sylvia and Adela).

In 1903, disillusioned with established suffrage organizations and tired of the parliamentary promises that failed to result in action, Pankhurst and a group of like-minded women founded the Women's Social and Political Union--a militant group whose activities soon moved from non-violent to violent, a group whose chosen motto was "Deeds Not Words."

Christabel was arrested in 1905 for spitting at a police officer, Sylvia and Adela the next year for protesting outside parliament. Refusing to pay fines, women were sent to prison for their political activities.

By 1908, the group had rallied a crowd of 500,000 in Hyde Park. Protestors threw rocks at the windows of 10 Downing Street; twenty-seven women, including Emmeline Pankhurst, were arrested, convicted, and sentenced to six weeks imprisonment. And women added hunger striking to their list of militant tactics--arrested again in October 1908, this time for producing an inflammatory handbill, Emmeline and the women imprisoned with her began a hunger strike (she is reported to have endured ten hunger strikes during one eighteen-month period.) Authorities responded by force feeding. Mary Clarke, Pankhurst's sister, was one of several women who died as a result of these brutal procedures. (For an essay from The Guardian describing the forcible feeding of women imprisoned for their militancy, click here.)

Afraid of the increasing violence, Emmeline Pankhurst's daughter Adela left the WSPU in 1911; her sister Sylvia also expressed her doubts. Undaunted, in 1912, Emmeline Pankhurst and her WSPU continued their window-smasing campaign, and Pankhurst spent another period in prison, undergoing yet another hunger strike. After her release, she went even further, advocating arson attacks--this resulted in Sylvia, too, leaving the WSPU. 

The outbreak of the first world war, in 1914, halted the activities of both the militant WSPU and the more moderate National Union of Suffrage Societies (and members like Millicent Fawcett and Elizabeth Anderson). Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst worked on behalf of the war effort (Adela and Sylvia were both committed pacifists).

After the war, in 1918, women--or, at least, some women--finally gained the right to vote. The 1918 Representation of the People Act, passed in February, gave women who were at least thirty years old the right to vote if they were property owners. (According to the UK Parliamentary website: "The age 30 requirement was to ensure women did not become the majority of the electorate. If women had been enfranchised based upon the same requirements as men, they would have been in the majority, due to the loss of men in the war.")

Although it is frequently said that Pankhurst ultimately witnessed the passage of the 1928 Representation of the People Act--the "Equal Franchise Act" that removed the various qualifications on women and granted them the same right to vote as men--she did not. Emmeline Pankhurst died on 14 June 1928--the bill was introduced into Parliament in March, but it did not pass and become law until 2 July 1928. 

There are many excellent biographies of Emmeline Pankhurst, so rather than suggesting a book about her, I'll link to work by her. You can read her autobiography via Project Gutenburg (click here) or at the Internet Archive (click here).

You can also read one of her great speeches, "Freedom or Death," delivered in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1913.

On 6 March 1930, a statue of Pankhurst was unveiled,
Victoria Tower Gardens
(with Westerminster in the background)

The sculpture today.

Update, February 2018: In honor of the centenary of some British women at last gaining the right to vote (the 1918 Representation of the People Act, 6 February 1918), the BBC's History Extra podcast has produced two excellent episodes: "The Suffragettes" and "The Pankhursts." Enjoy!

Update, 22 June 2025: From The Guardian: "Campaign for British Suffragette Hero Is Hit by Funding Crisis." Because of course it is--as Amelia Hill notes in her article, 

Mary Clarke, who was the sister of Emmeline Pankhurst, helped found the Women’s Social and Political Union and was imprisoned three times.

But she has been all but forgotten: there is no public memorial to her and she is not among the 59 suffragettes named on the Millicent Fawcett plinth in Parliament Square.

Mary Clarke took part in the Black Friday protests of 18 November 1910. She was arrested and imprisoned in Holloway prison, undertook a hunger strike, and was forcibly fed. She died three days after her release from prison.

Update, 1 August 2025: Another mention of the effort to fund a monument for Mary Clarke, but no new information: see the editorial offering "The Guardian View on Statues: New Monuments Reflect Changing Values and Reinvigorate the Public Realm."

Millicent Garrett Fawcett: "I Cannot Say I Became a Suffragist. . . . I Was Always One"

Millicent Garrett Fawcett (born 11 June 1847)

Two days ago I posted about Elizabeth Garrett--Millicent Garrett is yet another of the "pioneering" Garrett sisters.

Millicent Garrett Fawcett, c. 1880

More than a decade younger than Elizabeth Garrett, Millicent found her interests in the social, economic, educational, and political status of women sparked when she was visiting her older sister in London in 1865, and the two heard John Stuart Mill speak on the the topic of women's rights. Through Mill, she met Henry Fawcett, a liberal politician and member of Parliament, whom she married in 1867. She gave birth to a daughter, Philippa, in 1868.

In the same year, Millicent Garrett Fawcett became involved with the suffrage movement, joining the London Suffrage Committee. She also became a well-regarded speaker on women's issues. In addition to speaking, she began to write. Her Political Economy for Beginners, published in 1870, was especially popular, with ten editions produced over the course of the next forty years. Two years later, she co-authored and published Essays and Lectures on Social and Political Subjects with her husband. 

Her activism supported improvements for women's educational opportunities as well. She was instrumental in helping to found Newnham College, at Cambridge. Following a series of "Lectures for Ladies" in 1870, the college had begun with five students in a house on Regent Street (Cambridge) in 1871. By 1875, after raising funds, finding property, and signing leases, Fawcett and other founding members were able to open the doors of a "purpose-built" college, Newnham. (For a brief history of Newnham College, click here.)

After her husband's death in 1884, Fawcett retired temporarily from political activities, but within a year she was back to campaigning on a variety of issues, from trade unions and and tariff reform to the question of Irish home rule and the elimination of the "white slave trade" (the sexual trafficking of women and girls). She also joined the Personal Rights Association, which attempted to expose men who preyed on women--in one notable incident, she participated in an attack on an army officer who had been stalking a female servant.  

In 1890, Fawcett also joined the largest organization campaigning for women's suffrage, the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) and was quickly elected president.   

In 1900, the British government asked Fawcett to lead a commission to South Africa to investigate complaints about "policy of extermination" used against the Boer population at the end of the Second Boer War, in particular the government's concentration camps. The Fawcett Commission reported that, because of British policies, 27,927 Boers had died of starvation, disease, and exposure in the concentration camps. 

Fawcett's positions on some issues are not without controversy. She campaigned against the passage of the 1857 Divorce Act, supported by many women. Fawcett opposed it for its establishment of a sexual double standard: "a man can obtain the dissolution of the marriage if he can prove one act of infidelity on the part of his wife; but a woman cannot get her marriage dissolved unless she can prove that her husband has been guilty both of infidelity and cruelty." 

Fawcett and the NUWSS disavowed the more militant tactics of many suffragists (in fact, her niece, Louisa Anderson, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson's daughter, was arrested and imprisoned for her role in the Women's Social and Political Union window-breaking protest of 1912). Fawcett also supported the war efforts after the outbreak of war in 1914, and rejected the pacifist position taken by the NUWSS. 

Fawcett remained active in the suffrage campaign, largely suspended during the war. But in February 1918, the British Parliament passed the Representation of the People Act, enfranchising women over the age of thirty who were either householders or married to householders. This was followed by the Qualification of Women Act, in November of the same year, which gave women the right to stand for election to Parliament. (For the 1918 Representation of the People Act, click here.) After this, the NUWSS disbanded, and Fawcett, then in her seventies, largely retired from political life.

She was, however, in Parliament in 1928 when the Equal Franchise Act passed--it gave women equality with men, granting them the same right to vote as male citizens. Like men, they had to be twenty-one years old, but there were no longer any marriage or property requirements. (For the 1928 Equal Franchise Act, click here.)

About the experience, she wrote, "It is almost exactly 61 years ago since I heard John Stuart Mill introduce his suffrage amendment to the Reform Bill on May 20th, 1867. So I have had extraordinary good luck in having seen the struggle from the beginning."

Fawcett died on 5 August 1929.

In addition to her early publications, noted above, Fawcett published a novel, a number of biographies, histories of the suffrage movement (Women's Suffrage : A Short History of a Great Movement [1912], The Women's Victory and After: Personal Reminiscences, 1911–1918 [1920], and What I Remember: Pioneers of the Woman's Movement [1924]).

There's a wonderful biographical essay online at Spartacus Educational.

Update: On 2 April 2017, Prime Minister Theresa May announced that a statue of Millicent Garrett Fawcett would be erected in Parliament Square, the first statue honoring a woman (there are currently eleven men so honored). As May noted, "It is right and proper that she is honored in Parliament Square alongside former leaders who changed our country. Her statue will stand as a reminder of how politics only has value if it works for everyone in society." 

The timing of the new installation is noteworthy. In her article in The Independent, Prudence Wade writes that the sculpture of Fawcett "will form part of celebrations to mark the centenary of the Representation of the People Act 1918, which was introduced thanks to Fawcett’s campaigning which first gave women the right to vote"--that is, it gave some women the right to vote. Full suffrage for women in Britain was not won until 1928. (For the 1918 Representation of the People Act, click here. For the 1928 Equal Franchise Act, click here.)

Update: On 24 April 2018, Gillian Waring's sculpture of Millicent Garrett Fawcett was unveiled in Parliament Square. As noted in an editorial in The Guardian: 

The sculptures that adorn our public spaces matter. It is time for women – and not just the semi-naked women who are sculpted as allegories for Justice or Peace – to become part of the grammar of our streets. Ms Wearing’s accomplished bronze makes a good start.

Gillian Waring's sculpture of Millicent Garrett Fawcett,
Parliament Square, London

To read the editorial, click here.